


Walk The Line

by TriplePirouette



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-15
Updated: 2012-10-15
Packaged: 2017-11-16 09:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/537996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriplePirouette/pseuds/TriplePirouette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Ep for 2x02 We are Both. Unable to cross the line out of Storybrooke, Rumpelstiltskin needs to decide who he will fight for: Belle or Bae, and fully expects Belle to leave him when she finds out what he’s done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walk The Line

**Author's Note:**

> GDI, Rumpel. Do you have to be such a complex bastard? Do you have to make me afraid of you and hate you and feel for you all in the same episode? WHY IS ROBERT CARLYLE NOT GETTING ALL OF THE AWARDS?  
> ANGST. ANGST AHEAD. Bring tissues.

He slams the door, limping past the light in the kitchen and the wafting smell of fresh baked bread and doesn't stop until he's in the old red leather chair in his study twisting the handle of his cane tightly in his hands. 

He doesn't turn the light on. Doesn't need it. Doesn't deserve it. 

He reaches out to the left, expecting to find a cut glass decanter full of scotch, and turns and looks when his hand lands on a soft ball of knitting. He grasps it, the needles and half finished scarf and all, and after holding it for a second hurls it at the wall. There's no satisfying crash: it barely bounces as it falls, the needles not even making a click to satisfy his need for destruction as it bounces to the ground. 

There is a startled yelp, though. 

He looks to his right, seeing Belle's outline in the door and he sighs. He is not ready for this conversation. He is not ready for this moment. But it has to happen. It has to. She leans against the edge. “Rumplestiltskin?” Her voice is quiet, cautious. She is soft and sweet and even from across the room the scent of the bread she's baked clings to her and makes him feel warm. 

This is why she is dangerous. He needs to find a way out of all of this, will likely have to kill and maim and hurt to get to his boy, and she makes him want to do none of it. Standing there, barefoot and slightly wild haired and in a pair of jeans he even forgot he owned and a white dress shirt that are both his and not nearly as big on her as they should be... well, he needs her. He needs her, and hasn't that just always been the way?

He holds out his hand, silently beckoning, and she doesn't hesitate to walk over and twine her fingers into his. He pulls, just a bit, and she drapes herself across his lap, taking has hands into hers. “Hard day at the shop?” Belle tries to keep her voice light, but up close he can see the worry in her eyes. 

There's a quip about closed signs on the tip of his tongue. There's a silly story about watching the dwarfs with pickaxes in the back of his brain that will distract her long enough for him to calm down. But she's stayed, she's here, and he's made enough mistakes for more lifetimes than he ever should have, and he wants that to end. 

With her in his arms, he wants that to end. 

He slips one hand from between hers, smoothing down the wayward strands of her hair and brushing away tiny spots of flour. He looks anywhere but her eyes. “Belle, I owe you a story.” 

She smiles at him, but he can't look at it. She won't smile when she knows, she won't. She very well may leave him. “I like a good story.” He can tell how tightly she holds her voice, how hard she's working to keep it calm and even even though she's worried about him. 

He's quiet, searching for the words. He just keeps brushing at her hair lightly, avoiding her eyes and breathing like he can somehow change the past if he keeps his heart from pounding out of his chest. He knows he's been silent too long when she takes her hand and starts carding it through his hair. He pulls her fingers away, kissing her knuckles and dipping his head as he holds her hands tightly. He can't look at her for this, he just can't. 

A coward. After all this time, he's still a coward. 

“My son's name is Baelfire. When I said...” His voice cracks, but he clears his throat and swallows harshly, continuing. “When I said I lost him, I really meant that he was lost. He was trying to find a way to take away the curse. He got help from the Blue Fairy: a magic bean that would take us to a world without magic. This world. I... I told him I would go, but I lost my nerve and he... he went without me.” 

She starts to coo at him, to try to hug him, but he can't have it. He looks up at her, tears pooling in his eyes and he holds her hands tight so she can't comfort him. “No. No. That's a lie. I let go. We were falling into a portal and I let him go. He fell and I stayed and the moment that it closed I knew that I'd made the worst mistake of my life. It was my own fault that I lost him. My fault.” 

He's shaking. He's shaking beneath her and the tears start to fall and he can't help it anymore. Centuries. He's spent centuries making and breaking deals, reading thousands upon thousands of books, looking for and finding true love and then finding a way to do the impossible by bottling it and it has all been for naught. He has literally torn apart his own world for his son and he still cannot get to him. 

So many things are now his fault. 

Belle pulls her hands from his shaking fists and holds him. She wraps around him, petting his hair and rubbing circles into his back and by the gods if it isn't exactly what he needs. He grips her tight, a drowning man searching for air as he gasps in breath. Her soft murmurs don't make sense to his ears, but her touch, her warm touch and the yeasty scent of the bread and her body held tight by his is all he ever dreamed of for so long. 

He's going to lose her, to lose this. He knows it. There's still so much more to tell. 

He pulls away, taking her jaw in his hands and he's not surprised at the sad, concerned look in her eyes. He shudders a breath out, trying to memorize it before she leaves him. “Belle, I made this curse. I made it to get here to find my son. Regina cast it, but I made it. I spent centuries of my life doing cruel, unspeakable things to people to be able to cast this curse. I did unspeakable things to her to ensure that she would be dark enough to cast it, to make sure that my hands were clean when it came to the details of it. But I was the one who did it. I tore our world apart to cast this curse. I ruined so many lives just to find my son and now...” 

Her face is stony, but she still doesn't look away. “Now?”

“We can't leave,” he whispers. “We can't leave or we forget who we are. If I forget...” His words fall away and his chin shivers. 

She brings a hand to his face, wiping away the tears on his cheeks. “Mr. Gold never had a son, did he?”

He shakes his head, clenching his jaw so tight it aches. “No, and I wouldn't know, wouldn't remember.” He looks away for a moment, can't fathom what she's thinking, but needs to say something, needs to tell her, needs her to see... “Belle, oh, my darling. I was packing a trunk for you. We were going to go.” He pulls her close, burying his head into her hair and closing his eyes tight, seeing it all in his mind. “Oh, we were going to go and find my boy, and have such adventures doing it. I was going to show you the world, take you places, give you everything you told me you wanted that day in the castle. And you were going to help me be brave. We were going to see the world and I was going to get my son back and I was going to have everything I never deserved. But now you're stuck here...”

She pets his head again, tiny fingers and smooth nails against his scalp and it's soothing, oh so very soothing. “Here isn't so bad.”

He pulls away, looking into her eyes with a ferocity he knows she hasn't seen from him since the Dark Castle. “Here is bad. Here is so very bad right now. They'll want my help or my head. Regina's already come to me for help, as has Charming. We're trapped. They want to go back, dear. They want to go back and if I want to find my son...” He can't keep the emotion in again, he can't help the tears that fall. “If I want to find my son I have to do the very thing I promised you I wouldn't. I'll have to lie and cheat and hurt and use my power in ways that I know will hurt you. I'll have to choose, Belle, and Baelfire has to win. He has to.” 

He falls apart to pieces. He sobs. He gasps for air and he's never cried so hard in his entire life. He waits for the shift of weight from his legs. He waits for the moment when she leaves him. He waits for when she can't stand to see him so broken and cowardly. 

She kisses his forehead. 

She doesn't leave. 

Belle shifts to straddle his legs and hugs him tightly, pulling his head to her chest and rocks him like the child he feels he is. 

He doesn't deserve this. If she knew, if she only truly knew, she would be gone. She should be gone. 

“I should leave you,” she says, even as she holds him tight when his hysterics have calmed to strong sobs, “but I won't.” He can't make the question tumble from his lips, but his stuttering prompts her to know exactly what he's saying. “I care, I care a lot that you hurt people. I don't want you to do it again. But there's a part of me that thinks it's amazing that you would tear the world apart for you son. And there's a part of me that hates it.” She pulls away, looking into his red-rimmed eyes and holding his chin softly. “I won't make you choose between us.”

At first his heart soars, thinking it means she'll stay, but he panics, clutching at the back of her shirt convulsively and breaking apart even further. “Don't leave, Belle. Good Gods, please don't leave me.” He has never been a needy man, never needed to have anyone to exist. He'd proved that for centuries alone in his castle, for decades as the solitary Mr. Gold, but he's broken. He's finally broken. He's worked so long, so hard, done so many things he knows that Bae would never be proud of to get to him and he's lost. 

He's lost. All the power that he amassed wasn't enough. It still might not be. 

He can't lose them both. He simply can't. 

He is broken and shattered and can't seem to care that he's blubbering in her arms, that she's still holding him. That's she's shushing him and rubbing his back and there is nothing in this world he wouldn't give up to keep her with him. 

Except for his son. 

But there's no guarantee, now. This curse was his guarantee and if it didn't work, if his decades and decades of research and magic and power didn't work now, he knows there will never be enough time to get it to work here. The chances of finding his boy were so slim before, they're even smaller now. Miniscule. Tiny. Almost nonexistent. 

All he's done is for naught and all he can think of is that he should have let Belle kiss him that day in the castle. He should have given up then and let her break his curse. They could have been so very, very happy and instead he's only caused her pain every moment since. 

And yet, he can't let her go. 

“Not leaving,” she murmurs back against his forehead, holding him tight. She waits until he catches his breath again, whispering that she isn't leaving over and over again until he's coherent enough to look her in the eyes and really, truly, see her. “I'm not leaving. But you are going to tell it to me. All of it. I want to hear every horrible deed you've done. I know you don't want to, but I need you to.” He turns to hide his face in her neck, but she grasps his jaw and holds him tight. “If I'm going to stand by you, to help you, to keep you from stepping over that line and being the monster you don't want to be, I need to know who you were. I need to know all of it. If I'm going to do this, I need to know the truth.” 

She waits, waits for it to slowly seep into his addled mind. It takes a moment, a moment of dripping tears on both their parts, for it to register. “But if you lie to me,” she whispers, face stony and cold, “I can't stay. If you try to protect me by not telling the whole truth, I can't stay.” She presses her forehead to his. “You have to tell me everything. Everything, Rumpelstiltskin, and I'll stay. I may not like you at the end of it. I may not want to speak to you for a while, but I promise. I'll stay. And then we'll find a way to Baelfire, without hurting anyone else, together.” 

He thinks he must have made it up, for he surely, surely does not deserve those words. “Don't promise that,” he says, the words a physical pain to him. “You don't know what I've done yet, you won't be able to stay when you hear it. You won't.” 

Belle stalls, her face uncharacteristically blank as she wipes tears from the corners of his eyes and dries their drips from the bottom of his chin. She smooths out his hair and runs her fingers over his cheek. She holds his gaze. She holds it for so long he fears she'll see the darkness in him and leave this very moment. She takes his hands in hers, squeezing. “I promise you I won't leave.” She purses her lips and bites them, choosing her words carefully. “I won't promise,” she starts slowly and cautiously, “that I won't be mad, or upset.” She takes a deep breath and looks to the ceiling, trying to stave off tears. “I can't promise you that I'll even like you afterward.” The pain crosses her face and he knows it's his fault. He knows. “But I will love you. I will love you because you are trying and as long as you try...” Tears slip down her cheek again and she shakes her head, a sad smile on her lips as she tries to keep her words strong. “As long as you try I promise I will not leave you.” 

He buries himself in her, hiding from the world. His face beneath her chin and his arms up at her chest he can hide there for just a moment. He's broken, broken right here in her arms and she will absolutely keep him safe for just a minute more until he can piece himself back together. She wraps her arms around him, holding tight. “I don't deserve you,” he says harshly, enjoying the way she crushes him to her and not caring that he's weak. He needs this, he needs her, and he can wallow in it, just for a second more. 

Her cheek presses against the side of his head, holding him tight and warm and close. “You're the one who decides that, you know.” She kisses into the hair there, nuzzling close. “All things come with a price. You taught me that, be it small or large. My price is your truth.” She holds him close, her breathing softly slowing as she calms. “Tell me truth, even when I won't like it. Even when you don't like it. That's my price. That's my price for my forever.” 

“Deal,” he whispers, kissing her collarbone. “Deal,” he says over again, making his way up her throat and repeating it, in tiny, worshiping kisses. He can't tell her now. He's too raw, to open, to unsure of himself. He is shattered, broken, dark pieces of the man he's built, and all that's left is the spinner, the cowardly man who would do anything but be brave as he hides back in her embrace.

Belle, Belle is by far brave enough for the both of them, and that's just enough to start over.


End file.
